"I’d love to see a shutdown if we don’t get this stuff taken care of," Trump said Tuesday. "We have to strengthen our borders not by a little bit, but by a lot. We are so far behind the tide.”

Trump made the comments during a White House roundtable discussion with law enforcement and elected officials about the MS-13 gang. Trump has cited the gang as evidence that immigration poses a danger to the nation.

Nielsen: Gangs abuse immigration loopholes

Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Acting Assistant Attorney General John Cronan argued that Congress needs to close loopholes that allow MS-13 gang members to exploit immigration policies to enter the country legally and illegally.

"When we talk about MS-13 we have two or three main loopholes," Nielsen said. "The first is we have an admissibility problem, meaning that when they come to our border I have to let them in, I can’t keep them out just by virtue of them being in a gang. Once we catch them and detain them I cannot remove them by virtue of them being in a gang."

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President Trump railed against MS-13 in his 2018 State of the Union address, but what is MS-13?
Wochit

The meeting included five Republican legislators, including Rep. Martha McSally, an Arizona Republican who is running for the U.S. Senate. McSally said that border agents had told her gangs like MS-13 and cartels are exploiting loopholes, and even coaching unaccompanied minors and migrants arriving at the border.

"They turn themselves in and then they make false asylum claims because the cartels told them exactly what to say," she said. "If they are an unaccompanied minor from Mexico or Canada, they are then released quickly into the interior of the United States and we can’t do anything about it. Most of them don’t show up for their future court dates."

This assertion is disputed by groups that work with unaccompanied minors and asylum seekers. Trump is falsely portraying the U.S. asylum system as a dangerous risk for purely political gains, they said.

“Those who turn to this country for protection from persecution are often the vulnerable individuals who are fleeing gang violence in their own country," said Jennifer Quigley with Human Rights First, a nonpartisan advocacy group.

"Asylum seekers go through a long, complex process filled with safeguards against fraud before they are finally able to rebuild their lives in safety," she added. "By peddling the misleading narrative that asylum seekers are gang members and loopholes, the president threatens the lives of thousands of desperate individuals and betrays our country’s greatest strength.”

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Disagreeing with the president

During the discussion, Trump jabbed at current immigration laws saying that "not another country in world has the stupidity of laws that we do when it comes to immigration." He also repeatedly attacked Democrats, accusing them of endangering the country.

"If we have to shut it down because the Democrats don’t want safety ... we’ll go with another shutdown,” Trump said.

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In Trump's State of the Union address, he proposed changing the family-immigration system that allows legal immigrants to sponsor family members for green cards, an act that some call "chain migration." Alejandro Barahona/azcentral
Wochit

However, one of the five Republican legislators participating in the discussion told Trump that a shutdown wasn't necessary because cracking down on gangs was an issue both parties agree on.

"We don’t need a government shutdown on this," Virginia Rep. Barbara Comstock said. "I think both sides learned that a shutdown is bad."

The threats of a shutdown stem from ongoing negotiations over the fate of "dreamers" — the undocumented migrants brought to the U.S. as children.

Before Trump delivered his State of the Union address, the White House issued three demands related to immigration in exchange for its support of a path to citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers, including 800,000 protected from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Trump is asking for $25 billion for a U.S.-Mexico border wall system, an end to the diversity visa lottery program, and a reduction in family-based immigration.

After forcing a partial shutdown over DACA, Democrats voted to extend government funding until this week, in exchange for promises to debate protections for dreamers in Congress. But many of them, under pressure from liberal activists, view Trump's proposals as a non-starter in negotiations.